S.A.-based group NALAC awards $196,000 in grants internationally

The San Antonio-based National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures has awarded more than $196,000 to Latino arts and cultural groups throughout the United States and Latin America.

Among its winners is the San Antonio sewing cooperative Fuerza Unida for a project it does with a sister group in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico, called K’Inal Antsetik. The $8,100 grant will fund Fuerza Unida’s longstanding work in a project called “Conectando Hilos de la Justicia, Connecting Threads of Justice.”

NALAC said the grant will fund the expansion of Hilos’ transnational markets while providing jobs to women of color and enhancing their sewing skills.

“In the coming year,” the grant application says, “we’d like to expand our collective learning through more in-depth capacity-building with several sewing cooperatives in Chiapas. This project started three years ago between three women-led sewing cooperatives in Mexico and the U.S. This year, Fuerza Unida is partnering with Jolom Mayaetik and four other women-led cooperatives in Chiapas via K’inal Antsetik, ‘Land of Women,’ a center for the capacity-building of indigenous women in Chiapas.”

The prize was awarded from one of NALAC’s three grant programs, the Transnational Cultural Remittances Program. Its other grant programs are the NALAC Fund for the Arts and Diverse Art Spaces. Their winners are in New York, New Jersey, California, Virginia and Louisiana, as well as in Mexico and Guatemala, among others.

One of NALAC’s other winners was filmmaker John J. Valadez from Warwick, N.Y., who was just in San Antonio for a screening and panel discussion of his new PBS project, “Latino Americans.”

Valadez received a $6,216 grant to help underwrite a documentary, “American Exile.” He described it as a new one-hour documentary “about two brothers, Valente and Manuel Valenzuela, both military veterans who volunteered and fought in Vietnam. Now, 40 years later the Department of Homeland Security is trying to deport them to Mexico, a country they have not been to since childhood. The Valenzuela brothers believe they are American but, it turns out the question of citizenship can be complicated. Through their story we will learn about a much larger phenomenon: the exile of thousands of military veterans after completing their service in the armed forces and the devastating effect it is having on families and communities across the country.”